May 2016

The problem with being pragmatic is that you tend to underestimate other people's frustration and anger. Because you could never imagine wanting to wreck the whole thing, you have a deep and abiding belief that no one would ever desire such utter and complete wreckage.

No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen. — Epictetus

While there are splinter factions that sincerely advocate a return to authoritarian and feudalistic politico-economic models, most influential people in the West advocate neoliberalism, which most Westerners don't recognize as an ideology and just accept as fact.

When AI is more advanced and the next level of automation comes to eliminate service jobs, it's possible that programmers that aren't working on extending/maintaining AI will be among the first to be eliminated.

The bridge building probably can't really start until Clinton clinches the nomination, but if she doesn't succeed in reconciling with a majority of Sanders voters (the Bernie-or-Trump crowd is unreachable anyway) then we're definitely going to be watching Trump being inaugurated next January.

Caveats: yeah, it's a Fox News poll, the margin is well within the error range, polls this far out from the general election are mostly useless, Trump has already clinched the nomination while Clinton hasn't, etc., etc., but, still, it kind of freaks me out. [#‎AllHailPresidentTrump](/tag/all-hail-president-trump "tag: All Hail President Trump • mahiwaga"

Imagine an updated version of "Fight Club" where instead of blowing up buildings, Tyler Durden merely creats a botnet that automatically creats hundreds of billions of fake accounts with emojis in their nicknames based off stolen identities, and Project Mayhem's only responsibility is to answer phones and pretend to be the people whose identities were stolen… (I think I may have thought too hard about this….)

Bill Cosby makes me think that the reason why some PoCs turn to respectability politics is that they're secretly terrible—possibly quite monstrous—people who want to convince other PoCs that if they get called out, it will make the whole race look bad, so it's in everyone's best interest to never call them out.

I remember apocryphal stories of pan-resistant E. coli at one of the ICUs I did my residency at. You had to wear outbreak suits to get in and out. I never figured out how they managed to end the quarantine. I can't imagine that every patient in that unit died….

When you get right down to it, the antibiotic resistance crisis is mostly driven by profitability. It simply isn't profitable to invest all that money in R&D, clinical trials, and marketing of antibiotics. Despite their obvious critical utility, the demand for antibiotics that are effective against multidrug-resistant pathogens is, overall, not very high.